RESEARCH ARTICLE
Fractal Characteristic Analysis of Watershed as Variable of Synthetic Unit Hydrograph Model
I Gede Tunas1, 2, *, Nadjadji Anwar1, Umboro Lasminto1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 706
Last Page: 718
Publisher ID: TOCIEJ-10-706
DOI: 10.2174/1874149501610010706
Article History:
Received Date: 20/04/2016Revision Received Date: 6/09/2016
Acceptance Date: 7/09/2016
Electronic publication date: 31/10/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Fractal characteristic of watershed is an important parameter which influences the formation of synthetic unit hydrograph. Based on a previous study, hydrology response of watershed expressed in hydrograph form could be well presented by hydrology network characteristic as a form of fractal characteristic of watershed [1]. Fractal characteristic of watershed was stated as fractal dimension which was presented in three parameters i.e. river branch ratio (RB), river length ratio (RL) and watershed river area ratio (RA). The purpose of this research was to analyze fractal characteristic and to verify its fractal dimension stability as preliminary research to prepare variables which would be used to develop synthetic unit hydrograph model in the future. Analysis was undertaken using two methods i.e. Horton’s Coefficient Ratio and Box Counting Dimension. Analysis result revealed that fractal dimension of river network from 8 watersheds calculated using those two methods could give almost the same result, ranged from 1 to 2. Fractal dimension from calculation also showed similarity with study conducted by Tarboton et al. [2], Balkhanov et al. [3], Khanbabaei et al. [4], obtaining that fractal dimension of river network is generally in the range of 1 to 2.
